We oppose the militarization of borders in South America
Mood:  down
Now Playing: Senator Merkley: Appropriations Committee: passed a bill with incentives for such militarization, prevention and return of mig
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "pcasc staff" <info@pcasc.net>
Date: Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 3:22 AM -0700
Subject: Re: Boletin MMM Junio - WMW Newsletter Jun - MMF bulletin Juin.
To: "pcasc activist" <pcasc-activist@pcasc.net>
Cc: <mmm-mmf-wmw-friends@listas.movimientos.org>

"Yes, now more than ever, we need a link, to connect with our sisters in the four corners of the world, because the situation today has become unsustainable: violence against women has been escalating as a result of increasing militarization, and poverty is deepening as result of the dispossession of our livelihoods. Corporate powers and governments are reinforcing their mechanisms for control, intimidation and the criminalization of women and social movements that stand for justice in defence of Mother Earth, in defence of democracy, in defence of life."

 

This asks us to bring similar requests together in one call to each member of Congress, because it's the same problem of militarization that drives abuses consistently.  Militarization is the tool of the corporations and upper class to dominate, exploit, and make big profits.

 

We at PCASC have been asking our members of Congress to oppose the militarization of borders that the US Administration is pushing for Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and the return of refugees from these, who have often then been murdered.

We have not seen any positive actions from them. Senator Merkley is on the Appropriations Committee that passed a bill with incentives for such militarization, prevention of migration, and return of migrants, despite our asking that he seek to remove these conditions. His office did not inform us of the consideration of this bill (State and Foreign Operations, Central America section) nor whether Senator Merkley took any action.  His foreign affairs staff, Adrian Snead, told us that Plan Colombia, the militarization of Colombia during which 6.4 million people were victimized, was a success.

 

The message above and attached newsletter here from the World March of Women articulates clearly messages we ask you to take to your members of Congress: stop US militarization programs!  They will tell you they will convey your message. Ask for commitments to action and their responses to your request and call them back.  They have been slippery and avoided acting.  Please help us persist and insist that not standing up emphatically for human rights is not acceptable because they can act to diminish the suffering and abuses.  They can so they need to.

1.  The message above and in the email below and its attached newsletter shows us AND our members of Congress the human rights abuses THEY produce when they allow militarization: women suffer a lot of the abuse.

Specifically, please call them and tell them to join others or initiate action to stop supporting the abuses against women (and others) in Turkey (and everywhere) that they have set up by building up military forces and to end that military support. I would read the first paragraph above because it identifies clearly the harm from militarizing.  Men and children get killed and abused, too, in Latin America.

Other information tells us to get US nuclear weapons out of Turkey, which just had a coup attempt, before ISIS or a hostile takeover gets them.  Threatening Russia with nuclear weapons next door is foolish and destructive: get the hawks who want war and abusive governments like the one the US set up in the Ukraine out.

2.  Please call and tell ask them AGAIN to cosponsor the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, HR 5474, and sign onto Rep Lowenthal's letter to the Secretary of State to get serious about human rights abuses in Mexico (due Th July 28), if they are in the House, and they can introduce these in the Senate.  Representative Bonamici has cosponsored both already, Reps Blumenauer and DeFazio have signed the Lowenthal letter. Rep Blumenauer is still thinking about Berta's Act -- it's high time he acted, his staff claims he's got a good record on human rights. Rep Schrader says he won't act unless Republicans are joining; if you're his constituent, you can tell him he represents his voters, not the Republicans in Congress.  He needs to assert his demands for human rights.  He can invite the Republicans and go on without them if they fail to act humanely.  Senators are just waiting around, apparently.  They all need to take initiative like Representative Bonamici, although she also would not initiate a Dear Colleague letter to stop the bill pushing militarizing Central American borders.

3.  Tell them to end the military support of the Colombian government, called Plan Colombia, not the success they claim but a disaster for its 6.4 million victims since it began (Latin America Working Group:The Human Rights Costs During Plan Colombia).  The treaty with the FARC, the main guerrilla group, means they don't need the capability to massacre the FARC after they disarm, which is what happened after a previous guerrilla group disarmed in the 1980s, so the US needs to ensure protection of disarmed guerrillas (and all Colombians) from military/police, corporate, and paramilitary attacks.  They need to disarm the paramilitaries.

4.  There are corporate-driven, militarily enforced land thefts, killings, and assaults in the Philippines (and other countries like the ones in Latin America).  What are they doing and will they do to stop the military attacks that the recent Lakbay Lumad USA tour showed us that drive people off their land?  Stop US military support to the Philippines and impose penalties for their human rights violations.

Often they will say that they defer to the ranking Democrats on the committee that a bill is in.  If it's about abuses of human beings (or our planet), we need them to insist on moral behavior just as we would.

 

Please phone or email me what responses you get to these specific requests. As an organization, we need to know what actions we take.  My experience is that I need to call them back to get a final response: they study things for a long time sometimes. Persistence!

Jack Herbert
971-205-2254

Core Team, PCASC

The War on Drugs and LAtin America
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: The War on Drugs - Books - Links - Articles to share
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

Washington Office on Latin America

From the "Just the Facts" blog

Monday, January 2, 2012

Long-form readings about Latin America in 2011: a list from Adam

Over the course of 2011, I read or saved a large pile of articles that were:

Somehow related to security in Latin America and the Caribbean;
Available at no cost on the Internet;
At least 2,500 words in length; and
Not written by the three organizations participating in the “Just the
Facts” project. See the end of this post for a list of our own 2011
long-form writings about security in Latin America and the Caribbean.

After a lot of reading over the holiday break, here are links to my
favorite 2011 long-form articles about security in the Americas.

Congratulations and thanks to the authors of all of these very
informative pieces. Comments are open on this post, so feel free to
add anything that I may have missed — I was on the road a lot last
year.

---

Bruce Bagley, “El ‘efecto globo’ o por qué se está perdiendo la
‘Guerra contra las Drogas,’” Razón Pública (Colombia), January 31,
2011. A veteran scholar of the “war on drugs” gives a thorough
overview of this endeavor’s current state, its shortcomings and its
unintended consequences. (Part 1) (Part 2)

Rory Carroll, “Drugs, murder and redemption: the gangs of Caracas,”
The Guardian(UK), March 10, 2011. Carroll tells the stories of gang
members in El Cementerio, a neighborhood in El Consejo, a city west of
Caracas.

Jim Popkin, “Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners’ Jungle-Built,
Kevlar-Coated Supersubs,” Wired, March 29, 2011. Worth a read, if only
for the photos.

Perry Anderson, “Lula’s Brazil,” London Review of Books (UK), March
31, 2011. A fair and engrossing overview, from a political economy
perspective, of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s eight years in office.

David Grann, “A Murder Foretold,” The New Yorker, April 4, 2011. An
account of the bizarre conspiracy around the death of Guatemalan
Rodrigo Rosenberg, which threatened the presidency of Álvaro Colom
until investigators, especially the UN anti-impunity commission
(CICIG), solved the case.

Patricio Zamorano, “Honduras: an urgent need for a new social pact,”
Center for Democracy in the Americas, May 2011. The author observes
the country’s peaceful “resistance” movement and determines that, in
an atmosphere of extreme polarization, achieving reconciliation in
post-coup Honduras will be a very complex task.

Sergio Arauz, Óscar Martínez, and Efren Lemus, “El Cártel de Texis,”
El Faro (El Salvador), May 16, 2011. A remarkable investigative piece
reveals a macabre alliance between narcotraffickers, gangs, police and
politicians in northwestern El Salvador.

Karl Penhaul, “Inside the FARC: Colombia’s guerilla fighters,” Al
Jazeera, May 30, 2011. The veteran war reporter, the first in several
years to find a way to embed with Colombia’s FARC, finds a guerrilla
group that remains deadly, but on the run and badly hurt by the
Colombian military’s air superiority.

Kevin Casas-Zamora, “The Travails of Development and Democratic
Governance in Central America,” The Brookings Institution, June 2011.
While exploring Central America’s grave institutional, political and
security shortcomings, Casas determines that Central America has still
made important progress since the 1980s.

Max Chafkin, “A Constant Feeling of Crisis,” Inc., June 2011. Based on
interviews with some of the country’s wealthy entrepreneurs, the
author finds that despite its booming economy, Argentina is a
difficult place to do business.

Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, “La raíz de la violencia,” Nexos (Mexico),
June 1, 2011. An exhaustive but clear look at violence trends in
Mexico. The author concludes that “Mexico now needs to focus its
efforts on reducing violence, even if this means directing less
resources to fighting international drug trafficking.”

Nik Steinberg, “The Monster and Monterrey: The Politics and Cartels of
Mexico’s Drug War,” The Nation, June 13, 2011. A Human Rights Watch
researcher looks at the rapidly deteriorating security situation in
Mexico’s principal industrial city.

“La telaraña de los ‘paras’ en Urabá,” Verdad Abierta (Colombia), June
14, 2011. The results of an investigation of how paramilitary groups
in northwestern Colombia became big landholders, allied themselves
with politicians, and even set up foundations that received
international aid — while simultaneously massacring and displacing
populations and trafficking drugs.

Daniel Wilkinson, “Death and Drugs in Colombia,” The New York Review
of Books, June 23, 2011. A Human Rights Watch researcher’s review of a
book by Claudia López offers one of the best overviews in English of
paramilitary power and Álvaro Uribe’s presidency in Colombia.

Damien Cave, “Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North,”
The New York Times, July 6, 2011. A look at demographic, economic and
security reasons why Mexican migration to the United States has
dropped sharply. I like the scrolling interactive feature in the left
column.

“Para que los hechos no se repitan,” Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Honduras, July 8, 2011. While finding fault on all
sides, the commission’s worthwhile report finds that an illegal
military coup did take place on June 28, 2009, and that an alarming
number of human rights abuses have followed.

Richard Marosi, “Inside the Cartel,” The Los Angeles Times, July
24-28, 2011. A four-part look, based on DEA investigations, of how
Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel “moves drugs into Southern California and
across the United States.” (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

“Violence and Politics in Venezuela,” International Crisis Group,
August 17, 2011. The report raises concerns about what worsening
organized crime, proliferating small arms, deteriorating justice
institutions and a polarizing political climate bode for Venezuela’s
future.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Calderón’s Caldron,” The Brookings Institution,
September 2011. Focusing on three zones, the author evaluates the
Mexican government’s frustrated attempts to deal with organized crime,
and suggests some strategic shifts.

María Teresa Ronderos, “La fiebre minera se apoderó de Colombia,”
Semana(Colombia), September 6, 2011. Mining companies have requested
22,000 exploration and exploitation titles, covering one-fifth of
Colombia’s territory. In eight years, the Álvaro Uribe government
granted 9,000 of them. (Though it’s not 2,500 words, see also this
June report on illegal mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, by Frank Bajak
of the Associated Press.)

“Keeping Haiti Safe: Police Reform,” International Crisis Group,
September 8, 2011. A diagnosis of Haiti’s National Police, which is
undergoing a slow, halting reform amid official calls to restore the
army that was abolished in the mid-1990s.

Xavier Albó, “El Alto in Flux,” Revista: Harvard Review of Latin
America, Fall 2011. A look at life and politics in the sprawling
majority-Aymara city that overlooks — and is now larger than — La Paz,
Bolivia.

“A Culture of Cruelty: Abuse and Impunity in Short-Term U.S. Border
Patrol Custody,” No More Deaths, September 21, 2011. A disturbing
report based on interviews of thousands of migrants deported from the
Border Patrol’s Arizona sector (PDF).

“Neither Rights Nor Security,” Human Rights Watch, November 9, 2011.
An indictment of the Mexican government’s security policies, which
have so far brought few improvements in security or the rule of law. A
useful guide to Mexico’s security and justice institutions, which in
HRW’s view are not reforming quickly enough.

Alma Guillermoprieto, “In the New Gangland of El Salvador,” The New
York Review of Books, November 10, 2011. The veteran reporter tries to
explain the country’s vexing maras phenomenon.

Juanita León, “Santos les está dando a los militares lo que Uribe
nunca se atrevió a concederles,” La Silla Vacía (Colombia), November
16, 2011. Discussing several legislative initiatives that would make
it harder to hold the military accountable for human rights abuses,
León paints a portrait of troubled civil-military relations in
Colombia under President Juan Manuel Santos.

Gustavo Gorriti and Romina Mella, “Entrevista a ‘Artemio’ en el
Huallaga,” IDL Reporteros (Peru), December 6, 2011. Reporters
interview a founding member of Peru’s Shining Path insurgency, who
still leads a small guerrilla column deep in the jungle. “Artemio”
admits his faction’s defeat and says he is willing to negotiate a
truce.

Mattathias Schwartz, “A Massacre in Jamaica,” The New Yorker, December
12, 2011. A narrative of the U.S.-supported May 2010 offensive against
Kingston drug trafficker Christopher “Dudus” Coke, in which Jamaican
security forces killed and abused civilians.

Here are some 2011 long-form articles by organizations participating
in the Just the Facts project.

Adam Isacson,”Rio de Janeiro’s Pacification Program,” WOLA, Just the
Facts blog, January 5, 2011.
Adam Isacson, “Six months in, Colombia’s Santos faces a murky security
situation,” WOLA, Just the Facts blog, February 8, 2011.
Elizabeth Newhouse, “The United States Should Take Immediate Steps to
Improve Relations with Cuba,” CIP, February 14, 2011.
Tom Barry, “Securing Arizona: What Americans Can Learn From Their
Rogue State,” CIP, Boston Review, March-April 2011.
Abigail Poe and Adam Isacson, “Stabilization and Development: Lessons
of Colombia’s “Consolidation” Model,” CIP, April 2011.
“No Relief in Sight: Report from Caribbean Coast of Colombia,”
LAWGEF-Lutheran World Relief, May 2011 (PDF).
Coletta Youngers, “The Obama Administration’s drug control policy on
auto-pilot,” WOLA-International Drug Policy Consortium, May 6, 2011
(PDF).
Adam Isacson, “In troubled Tumaco, little progress,”
CIP-WOLA-MINGA-INDEPAZ, Just the Facts blog, May 24, 2011.
Karelia Villa Mar, Adriana Beltrán, and Pablo González, “Mapeo de las
intervenciones de Seguridad Ciudadana en Centroamérica financiadas por
la cooperación internacional,” WOLA-IDB, June 2011 (PDF).
“Tackling Urban Violence in Latin America: Reversing Exclusion through
Smart Policing and Social Investment,” WOLA, June 2011 (PDF).
Tom Barry, “Policy on the Edge: Failures of Border Security and New
Directions for Border Control,” CIP, June 1, 2011.
Elizabeth Newhouse, “Contending with Natural Disasters: Cubans and US
Gulf Coast Emergency Managers Continue Conversation,” CIP, June 1,
2011.
Merecedes B. Arce Rodríguez, “The Human Cost: Cubans and Cuban
Americans Talk about Their Lives and the Embargo,” LAWGEF-WOLA, June
7, 2011 (PDF).
Adam Isacson, “In La Macarena, a program on ‘autopilot’,”
CIP-WOLA-MINGA-INDEPAZ, Just the Facts blog, June 9, 2011.
Laura Carlsen, “Development and Migration,” CIP, CounterPunch, June 27, 2011.
Tom Barry, “Aiding Insecurity: Four Years of Mexico’s Drug War,” CIP,
TruthOut.org, July 16, 2011.
Gimena Sanchez, “Against All Odds: Experiences of IDP Self-Protection
Measures in Colombia,” WOLA, August 16, 2011 (PDF).
Tom Barry, “U.S. Drug War Turns to Transnational Combat,” CIP,
September 1, 2011.
Gimena Sanchez and Kelly Nicholls, “Buenaventura, Colombia: Where Free
Trade Meets Mass Graves,” WOLA-U.S. Office on Colombia, NACLA Report
on the Americas, September 7, 2011.
Tom Barry, “Border Security After 9/11: Ten Years of Waste, Immigrant
Crackdowns and New Drug Wars,” CIP, Truthout.org, September 11, 2011.
Adam Isacson, “Human Rights During the Juan Manuel Santos
Administration’s First Year in Office,” WOLA-U.S. Office on Colombia,
September 29, 2011 (PDF).
Adam Isacson, “Land restitution and the “Black Hand”: Sunday’s local
elections in Colombia,” Just the Facts blog, October 27, 2011.
“A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia’s Lessons for U.S. Policy Toward
Mexico and Beyond”, CIP-LAWGEF-WOLA, November 2011 (PDF) (PDF en
español)
Maureen Meyer, “Elections in Nicaragua,” WOLA, November 1, 2011.
Adam Isacson, “A human rights counteroffensive in Colombia,” Just the
Facts blog, December 1, 2011.
Adam Isacson, “An Uneasy Coexistence: Security and Migration Along the
El Paso-Ciudad Juárez Border,” WOLA, December 20, 2011.

PART III Seven Years After and the Portland HOLA activists
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: Open Veins - Open Hearts - This is what we do - HOLA PDX
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

 HOLA discussion Sunday at the Waypost Inn

---

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2010/12/404180.shtml

Portland Indymedia link of the 18-page article being discussed

---

In Portland Oregon there is a group of activist friends of mine, that meet bi-weekly at the minimum, and at leats every month at the Waypost Inn, in solidarity with Latin America struggles for justice and peace.

This group is part of the bigger (mother) group in Portland that has been in this kind of human rights / solidarity activism for around 25 years (or more?)  and their name is PCASC www.pcasc.org . 

The sub group is the one I am mentioning here today: HOLA which stands for Hands Off Latin America, has planned for the monthly meeting at The Waypost Inn (Google map- http://tiny.cc/kecfh ) and it is located in North Portland.

(Sunday 12/5/10 - 12:30 pm meeting time this month) We meet to discuss a follow up discussion recently written by the author of the book "Open Veins in Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano

As an example of what this discussion is going to be on I have copied 1- 1/2 pages from our 18-page reading discussion that we have lined up for today.

This article discuss basically what our HOLA group is involved in, it reflects some of our tradition concerns and issues that we as a solidarity group  "get involved in"

So here is the authors follow up from "Open Veins of Latin America"  (out-take)  and our HOLA discussion page / teaser below...

Want more information or to read the whole 18 page discussion? Please contact me iam@joe-anybody.com   

Look PCASC up on their website to get involved more in solidarity.

 

 

---

 

****************************************************************************** 

PART III Seven Years After

by Eduardo Galeano

The U.S. Congress resolved in 1976 and 1977 to suspend economic andmilitary aid to various Countries. But most U.S. external aid doesn't gothroughthe congressional filter. So despite pronouncements, resolutions, andprotestsGeneral Pinochet's regime got $290 million of direct U.S. aid in 1976 withoutcongressional authorization. When General Videla's dictatorship in Argentinawas a year old it had received $500 million from private U.S. banks and $415million from two institutions (World Bank and Bank for InternationalDevelopment) in which the United States has decisive influence. Argentina'sspecial rights for International Monetary Fund loans, $64 million in 1975, hadrisen to $700 million two years later.President Carter's concern about the butchery in some Latin Americancountries seems healthy, but the present dictators are not self-taught: theyhavelearned the techniques of repression and the arts of government atacademiesrun by the Pentagon in the United States and the Panama Canal Zone.

These courses are still being given today, and no change is known to have beenmadein their content. The Latin American military men who are now causing ascandal in the United States have been good pupils. A few years ago when hewas defense secretary, Robert McNamara, now president of the World Bank,spelled it out: "They are the new leaders. I don't need to expatiate on thevalueof having in leadership positions men who have previously become closelyacquainted with how we Americans think and do things. Making friends withthose men is beyond price."7One wonders if those who made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair?The bishops of France speak about another sort of responsibility, deeper andless visible: "We, who belong to nations purporting to be the world's mostadvanced, form a part of those who benefit fromexploitation of the developing countries.

We do not see the sufferings thatthisinflicts on the flesh and spirit of entire peoples. We help to reinforce thedivision of the present world in which the domination of poor by rich, of weakby strong, is conspicuous. Do we know that our squandering of resources andraw materials would not be possible without the control of internationalexchange by the Western countries? Do we not see who profits from the arms traffic, of which our country has provided sad examples? Do we perhaps understand that the militarization of poor countries' regimes is one of the consequences of economic and cultural domination by the industrialized countries, where life is ruled by the lust for profits and the power of money?

"8Dictators, torturers, inquisitors: the terror has its officials, just as it haspost offices and banks, and they apply it because it is necessary. It isn't acaseof a plot by the perverse. General Pinochet may look like a figure in Goya's"black art," a prize specimen for psychoanalysts, or the inheritor of a savagetradition from the banana republics. But the clinical or folkloric roots of this orthat dictator, which provide seasoning for history, are not history. Who woulddare maintain today that World War I broke out because of the complexes ofKaiser Wilhelm, who had one arm shorter than the other? As Bertolt Brechtwrote at the end of 1940 in his working diary: "In democratic ountries theviolent character inherent in the economy doesn't show itself; in authoritariancountries the same holds true for the economic character of violence."In Latin America's southern lands the centurions have taken over power asa function of the needs of the system: the terrorism of the state is put intoaction when the dominant classes can pursue their business by no othermeans.Torture wouldn't exist in our countries if it weren't effective, formaldemocracywould continue if it could be guaranteed not to get out of the hands that holdpower. In difficult times democracy becomes a crime against nationalsecurity--that is, against the security of internal privilege and foreign investment. Ourdevices for mincing human flesh are part of an international machinery.

The whole society is militarized, the state of exception is made permanent, andtherepressive apparatus is endowed with hegemony by the turn of a screw in thecenters of the imperial system. When crisis begins to throw its shadow, thepillage of poor countries must be intensified to guarantee full employment,public liberties, and high rates of development in the rich countries.

The sinister dialectic of victim-hangman relations: a structure of successive humiliationsthat starts in international markets and financial centers and ends in everycitizen’s home.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. It has morefootwashersthan shoe shiners: little boys who, for a penny, will wash the feet ofcustomers lacking shoes to shine. Haitians, on the average, live a bit morethanthirty years. Nine out of every ten can't read or write. For internalconsumptionthe barren mountain sides are cultivated. For export, the fertile valleys: thebestlands are given to coffee, sugar, cacao, and other products needed by theU.S.market. No one plays baseball in Haiti, but Haiti is the world's chief producerof baseballs. There is no shortage of workshops where children assemblecassettes and electronic parts for a dollar a day. These are naturally forexport;and naturally the profits are also exported, after the administrators of theterrorhave duly got theirs. The slightest breath of protest in Haiti means prison ordeath. Incredible as it sounds, Haitian workers' wages lost 25 percent of theirwretched real value between 1971 and 1975.9 Significantly, in that period anew flow of U.S. capital into the country began.

I recall an editorial in a Buenos Aires daily a couple of years ago. An oldconservative newspaper was bellowing with fury because some internationaldocument depicted Argentina as an underdeveloped country. How could acultured, European, prosperous, white society be measured by the sameyardstick as a poor black country such as Haiti?

Of course the differences are enormous, although they have little to do withthe analytical categories of Buenos Aires's arrogant oligarchy. But with all thediversities and contradictions one could mention, Argentina isn't outside thevicious circle that strangles the Latin American economy as a whole. Nointellectual exorcism can remove it from the reality that, to a greater orsmallerextent, the other countries of the region share with it.General Videla's massacres are, after all, no more civilized than those of"Papa Doc" Duvalier or his successor to the throne, although in Argentina thetechnological level of the repression is higher.

Essentially both dictatorships act at the service of the same objective: to supply cheap labor to aninternational market that demands cheap products. Fresh from taking power, the Videla dictatorship hastened to ban strikesand decree freedom of prices while putting wages behind bars.

Five monthsafter the coup d'état, the new foreign investment law put foreign and nationalenterprises on an equal footing. .......--> cont  

 

COLOMBIA NO BASES
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: COLOMBIA - US MILITARY BASES - Organizing (english)
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

http://www.colombianobases.org/

LAUNCHING OF THE COALITION COLOMBIA NO BASES       Written by: Coalition bases not    Saturday, 07 July 2007 09:54

To commemorate 200 years of independence from Colombia, our republic is a victim of the worst forms of foreign aggression.

The government of Alvaro Uribe Velez ceded control of seven military bases to U.S. troops, the largest surrender of national sovereignty since the country stopped being a Spanish colony.

 

 

MORE to read here --> http://www.colombianobases.org/

More US Impearlism as Clinton spins the web of US policies for Latin America on 3.5.10
Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: Clinton Snide Talk About Latin American
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

March 05 2010

Clinton Bombs in Latin American

 

SOA and the historic gathering in Venezuela this summer
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: SOA Watch Encuentro
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

June 21-26: Building a Cross-Continental Movement

SOA Watch Encuentro

We invite you to be part of a historic gathering in Venezuela this summer that will launch a vibrant South-North SOA Watch movement of the Americas!

From June 21-26, 2010, anti-militarization activists and human rights defenders from across the Americas will be gathering at the South-North SOA Watch Encuentro in Venezuela to strategize on ways to work together to close the SOA/ WHINSEC, and to open connections that honor the dignity and sovereignty of all people.

The Encuentro will bring together grassroots organizers and human rights leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The Encuentro builds upon the visits of SOA Watch's Partnership America Latina (PAL) to 16 Latin American countries that led to announcements by 5 countries of their withdrawal from the SOA/ WHINSEC.

If you are an SOA Watch activist that has participated in organizing efforts to close the SOA, and if you have the interest and energy to help launch this new phase of the SOA Watch movement, we invite you to apply to participate as a representative to the Encuentro.

Participation will be limited to approximately 12 representatives from the U.S. and Canada, in order to ensure a balance of representatives at the gathering from different corners of the Americas. A balance of representation from different parts of the U.S. and Canada will also be a goal. Spanish language fluency is not a requirement for participation, as there will be translation at the event.

Representatives to the SOA Watch Encuentro, along with their local groups, are expected to raise funds for their round-trip airfare to Venezuela, and for the Encuentro fee of $500 that covers all in-country transportation, food, lodging, materials and translation.

History is made by movements of people who organize themselves to struggle collectively for a better world.

Click here to Download the SOA Watch Encuentro application form.

Close the SOA School - HR 2567
Mood:  on fire
Now Playing: Latin America Military Training Review Act, also known as HR 2567
Topic: Latin America Solidarity

As your constituent, I urge you to contact the office of Rep. Jim McGovern and ask to be a cosponsor of the Latin America Military Training Review Act, also known as HR 2567. This legislation would suspend operations at the School of the Americas, renamed WHINSEC, and investigate the history of human rights abuses and failed policies of the institution.

New information indicates that WHINSEC has allowed known human rights abusers to instruct and receive training at the school. Argentina and Uruguay are two more countries that have made public announcements they will no longer send students to the school, citing the negative image and history of this institution. Despite demands by Congress to have oversight over the curriculum and promote human rights, the Pentagon is now denying all requests to provide information to human rights organizations and the public about students and graduates of the school.

I urge you to contact Cindy Buhl in Representative McGovern's office and ask that your boss be added as a cosponsor of HR 2567. I hope you will represent my views and support this bill.

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/t/3823/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27318